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You've got to organize a voting ring. Sadly, I've seen this work quite well for mediocre submissions several times. I've seen YC companies do this.
by woah 12y ago
You've got to organize a voting ring. Sadly, I've seen this work quite well for mediocre submissions several times. I've seen YC companies do this.
- ddod 12y agoYou could similarly just make a few accounts and run them off of a few different VPSs, since it only takes a handful of votes to get you on the front page. That strikes me as unethical, but I'm sure more and more interested parties will be doing that or getting large employee bases to accomplish the same thing as HN's user base increases.
- minimaxir 12y agoHacker News has a voting ring detector, so this is not recommended. (it will penalize articles with a high probability of having a voting ring and eventually kill them). The Brandery article that was submitted today was likely hit by a voting ring. That being said, there are some YC companies that do this. However, the flag mechanism far counteracts bad articles which have received unjust votes, so it's an unstable equilibrium.
- dang 12y agoIf you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8054209, yes, it tripped the voting ring detector. We unkilled that one a while ago. As for YC company voting rings: certainly this exists, but we penalize them too. I can't claim that we do it perfectly even-handedly—that would be claiming no unconscious bias—but we try to. That's one reason we do as much as we can programmatically, since the software has no such bias. The principle governing HN is to have the best possible content on the front page. Anything else would be pound-foolish. Not that we do have the best possible content, but that's our goal and is what drives our thinking.